Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

The real political headline for David Cameron's article on our pages today is not that he rejects the Archbishop of Westminster's criticism of the government's welfare reforms. It is that he endorses Ian Duncan Smith's presentation of them and, by implication, that he repudiates the political spin which George Osborne has given them.

The Prime Minister has now explicitly aligned himself with the IDS moral case for the benefit reform programme: that it is designed, above all, to rescue people from the dependency trap which welfare has created. It has always been the argument of the Centre for Social Justice, the think tank which IDS led and inspired, that by restoring hope and the chance of fulfilling individual potential, reforms to the benefit structure would be truly progressive and compassionate. He was adamant that his proposals should be understood as liberating people from the futility and defeatism of wasted lives, and not simply as cost-cutting exercises (which indeed, they are not in the short term).

But the Chancellor saw the tremendous popularity of the benefit reduction scheme as a sure-fire vote winner, and sought to present it in the mean-spirited terms that would suit popular prejudice. Hence the "workers vs shirkers" talk which came to dominate the Tory coverage of its plans. IDS was known to be furious about this: so far as he was concerned, it was a travesty of his intentions and of the wider social significance of what he now sees as his life's work.

So which interpretation – and political message – was Mr Cameron going to choose? The cheap, immediate vote-winner or the longer-term moral argument? Now we have the answer. And, ironically, it is the cleverer political option too. What the IDS case offers is a truly modern message: a significant departure from the "nasty Tory" language of a past generation. All the historical evidence indicates that as the economy recovers, and people feel more secure and optimistic, they will be more charitable toward those who are less well-off they they. As their attitude becomes less punitive and more sympathetic, the appeal of "workers vs shirkers" may well evaporate pretty rapidly. But the IDS case will remain irrefutable – and ethically right.